Since the ground-breaking ceremony for the Park Innovaare last November, the construction of the new Innovation Park has been progressing at a rapid pace. Research and industry will work closely together there to bring innovations to market. The new building should be ready for occupancy by the end of 2023.
The ground-breaking ceremony on 11 November 2019 - the starting signal for the official start of construction - was a significant moment not only for Park Innovaare, but also for PSI, which will rent around 65 percent of the available space in the new building and thus be the main tenant.
As early as September 2015 - about four months after the foundation of innovAARE AG - the Innovaare park with its "deliveryLAB", the 400 square metre wooden pavilion in the PSI's western area, became visible. Since then, both the innovAARE AG office and some of the companies previously located there have been based there.
In the new extension building with around 23,000 square metres of floor space, clean rooms, vibration-free research laboratories and workshops are planned in addition to offices. These offer sufficient space for the approximately sixteen high-tech companies - including PSI spin-offs - which have already settled in the Park Innovaare to date, as well as for other interested companies and for PSI itself.
Since last November, around 82,000 cubic metres of excavated material have been excavated for the new building. A special challenge for the construction was the hillside location of the site: The earth has to be excavated in stages with an excavator and the ground has to be continuously secured with a shotcrete wall, which when completed will be around 130 metres long and up to 13 metres deep in places.
If the construction work continues according to plan, work on the building construction can begin this year. In order to implement direct control and monitoring on site in the best possible way, ERNE's construction management team set up its own construction office on the site in March, which includes five offices and three meeting rooms. Thus, the construction management team will have its workplace directly on site for the next three years, i.e. the entire construction period.
